Laurent Graff

Na het eerste deel te hebben doorsparteld kwam het boek meer op dreef in 2 en 3de deel.
Een review op een Franse blog stemde me nadien wat milder. Eerste deel te begrijpen als maatschappijkritiek. Meer en meer big brother mentaliteit;
Je wordt zelfs gestraft voor misdaden die je enkel in gedachte begaat. (Ziet en weet God alles ? Ja God ziet en weet alles, ZELFS onze diepste gedachten zie de Catechismus in de vorige eeuw!)
Als God niet bestaat, vindt de maatschappij ('Men') hem toch weer uit, als algemene bestraffer, tot in de eeuwen der eeuwen...want een gerobotisseerde rechtspraak deelt op basis van een onwrikbare codex straffen uit, voorbij de dood... de hel 'revisited' ???… (mais)

The magazine Marie-Claire said, "It's not a long book, but it takes you far." In fact, Happy Days, though really a novella more than a novel, won the french Prix Millepages.

I think there are two [b:saving grace|130916|The Saving Graces A Novel|Patricia Gaffney|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171995451s/130916.jpg|126092]s to Happy Days: 1) it's short; and 2) I didn't pay for the book. I will feel no guilt at leaving this behind in my room in South Africa for some other desperate person to come across and read (hey, at least it's not Dan Brown!)

Happy Days is the story of a 36-year-old man named Antione who, after coming into a large inheritance, moves into a retirement community and waits to die. Most of the first half of the book is told in various short vignettes about the nursing home, with much longer portions of existential ramblings about the meaning of life and death. Halfway through the book, he meets Mireille, a cancer patient who is about to die. He embarks on a "science experiement" to watch the way that death claims a person. Predictably, in the end, in witnessing death, Antione learns to love life.

Much of this book reads as if a high-school student wrote it. Certainly, the prose is past the ability of most high school students, but the melodrama is not. This passage exemplifies the somewhat juvenile nature of the writing:


But I am forced to acknowledge that I do not have the talen of Moses; the sea does not open before me, and the horizon still remains blurry, distant, and closed to me, even as the windsurfer now hurls himself out to meet it, riding the waves full speed ahead .... Good luck!


I found this book to be generally tedious, and I wouldn't recommend it. There are only two reasons I am giving it a fair rating, as opposed to a poor rating: I consider Dan Brown to be my standard for the "poor" rating, and this isn't even close to that - though, Dan Brown has more engaging plots even if they are all the same; and I did find one analogy that I liked.

... Wreaths of cigarette smoke drape themselves like B-girls around the necks of the smooth talkers [in bars:].

And that's really the best I can say of it.… (mais)

Linda Coverdale was responsible for translating this novella from the original French. I'd like to meet her just so I can tell her how brilliant she is! I was overjoyed with sentences like "For this mortifying cynicism is not an end in itself, but a necessary evil in my attempt to fathom what lurks behind our miserable human condition, an anesthesia that allows me to perform open-heart surgery on man and rummage through his guts." Not a particularly cheerful sentence but you can see how well the translation was done - sentences like this are not often found when writing is linguistically secondhand.
I'm not sure I would have liked the novella so much if it was not so skillfully presented, but as I received it I very much enjoyed it. It is quiet and endearing in all the right ways.… (mais)

De Fransman Laurent Graff heeft al een paar dunne pareltjes achter zijn naam staan, vertaald als :"de man die op reis ging" en "gelukkige dagen". Recent is daar "de schreeuw" bijgekomen. Het overheersende thema is er steeds één van doem en van scherpzinnige lethargie. Ook in de schreeuw die is opgebouwd rond het gelijknamige schilderij van Münch hangt een waas van surrealisme. Zolang de hoofdpersoon, beambte in een tolwegstation observeert en registreert wat er aan hem voorbijtrekt - en dat levert soms zeer interessante gedachten op - is alles in orde. van zodra hij zijn post verlaat begint het drama zicht te voltrekken. Graff tekent scherp de contouren van het noodlot dat zich in toevalligheden hult. Hij deelt de mensen in in individuen die de innelijke hartekreet of existentiële schreeuw horen en andere die er doof voor zijn. Een novelle met een onverwacht slot.… (mais)